Western Digital's plan to acquire Virident for its PCIe flash storage technology could unhinge the Seagate-Virident joint technology development agreement the two signed in early 2013 when Seagate invested $40 million in the company.

With a new funding round, from investors not normally focused on startups, plus the recruitment of Frank Slootman, former Data Domain CEO and a master at getting companies notices, there's a good chance the all-flash storage array developer will soon look at an IPO.

Part 1 of a two-part VMworld roundup of a wide range of storage-focused hardware and software shows just how much of a focus storage has become in the new virtualized and cloud environments being built to handle today's complex workloads.

VMware is beefing up the storage leg of its software-defined data center strategy with VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), which pools SSDs and hard drives from up to eight servers to allow the capacity to be automatically provisioned as needed by virtual machines.

From tiny embedded flash storage memory modules to fully-configured all-flash arrays, the storage industry in the first half of 2013 was subjected to a barrage of new hardware and software promising increased performance for mission-critical applications.

It's been a mixed first six months on Wall Street for tech vendors, with some vendors like Hewlett-Packard seeing big run-ups in stock prices and others like FalconStor recording big drops in share value.

While sTec's new s3000 all-SSD storage appliance based on the Microsoft Windows Storage Sever 2012 offers availability and performance, one VAR questions whether there will be demand outside of all-Microsoft shops.